United Nations of Beer

Dawn of the Head beer zombie T-shirt

by Tom Warin
(Salem, MA)

Dawn of the Head beer zombie T-shirt

The history of brewing contains many dark episodes that today's brewers would rather not acknowledge. For many hundreds of years, hops have been an essential ingredient of beer, and for most of that time they have been expensive.

Before an act of Parliament was passed in 1819 to outlaw the practice, some unscrupulous British brewers would substitute substances ranging from wormwood to capsicum in order to cut their hop costs and please the accountants.

The darkest experiment of all, almost lost to history thanks to the still-unexplained spontaneous combustion of the brewery in question, concerned a young brewer's apprentice who experimented with the intensely bitter thumb of a recently decapitated zombie as an alternative bittering agent in beer.

Although beer scribes of the time said that the resulting ale "doth possess a quite pleasing taste and magnificent head of foam, in the continental style", the side effects were horrific. To say the least.

Although first-hand accounts of the plague of miniature beer zombies that climbed out of the tankards of thirsty patrons on that accursed winter morning are few and far between, experts at the Academy of Zombieology in Salem, Massachusetts, assure me that the design of this Dawn of the Head beer zombie T-shirt is an accurate rendering.

We can only hope that today's brewers, when faced with pressure from their corporate overlords to cut costs, remember this lesson...